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Why a Corporation cannot be a “Person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitutionhttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/why-a-corporation-cannot-be-a-person/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/why-a-corporation-cannot-be-a-person/#respondThu, 07 Feb 2019 23:20:55 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2258[This proof was discovered in 2011. The narration of the proof * was revised here in February 2019.]

The Constitution starts with “We the People… establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” Then the first sentence of Article I Section 2 and the first sentence of the 17th Amendment state that Representatives and Senators shall be “chosen” and “elected”“by the People” of “each state”. Those sentences – which include the only two sentences in all seven original Articles of the Constitution where the word “People” is used – establish the revolutionary principle that this shall be a government that is by and for “the People”. The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution were truly pioneering, establishing “the people” as the sovereign power in government. The word “person[s]”, however, appears 49 times in the Constitution, as amended. “Persons” would no longer be serfs, with lives subject to the whims of an aristocracy, but were “created equal … endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights”, struggling to establish a new type of government intended “to secure these rights”. The Constitutional meaning of the word “person” (and its plural form “people”) is critical to us, since the Constitution lists extremely important rights that belong to us.

The first two sentences of the third paragraph of Article I Section 2 delegate to the Congress of the United States the authority to identify and then enumerate (as per a formula) all “Persons… in such Manner as they shall, by Law direct”. Thus what is and what is not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, depends on two things: (a) ‘How does the Constitution itself use the word “person”?’ and (b) ‘How has the Congress defined a “person”, in exercising its authority outlined in paragraph 3 of Article I Section 2?’(a) The Constitution identifies “Indians”, “Persons” migrating or imported to “any of the States”, and “Persons held to Service or Labour” – also “citizens”, “free Persons” and “all other Persons” – as “persons” in the meaning of the Constitution [See Art I Sec 2, the 1st sentence of Art I Sec 9, the 3rd sentence of Art IV Sec 2, and the 14th Amendment]. The Constitution does not state or imply, anywhere, that an artificial legal entity is a “person”, nor does it declare in so many words that such entities are not Constitutional “persons”. Is that a loophole big enough to drive a corporation through, citing something allegedly pertinent emanating from the Roman Empire or English common law? It is not! Article I Section 2 explicitly delegates to Congress the authority and the responsibility to identify all Constitutional “persons”, and the Congress has exercised that authority with commendable consistency each decade since 1787, through the 21st century.(b) The U.S. Congress, in undertaking its very first Constitutional responsibility, has consistently identified all women, people of color (including indigenous people and slaves), wealthy white men, and others, as Constitutional “persons”. That being said, the Constitution names one and only one category of “person” which is not to be counted in the “number of persons in each state” for purposes of representation in Congress. That category is “Indians not taxed”. Thus, anything that is a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, with the sole exception of “Indians not taxed”, must be included in the enumeration that is mandated every ten years by Article I Section 2. But the Congress has never included corporations in that count. So, unless it is an “Indian not taxed”, a corporation cannot be a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.
[This passing mention in the U.S. Constitution of the indigenous people who suffered centuries of disinheritance, oppression and genocide, helps provide us with the answer to the question posed in the title of this essay, and the needed proof. The persistent denial of Constitutional rights to entire categories of “persons” has been a terrible injustice of historic proportions. Asserting (correctly) that the Constitutional rights of certain categories of “persons” have been systematically violated for many generations is very different from saying (incorrectly) that the Constitution did not ascribe any rights to those “persons”, or that the Constitution did not even recognize them to be “persons”.]

Persistent efforts have been made to stuff corporations into the Constitutional meaning of the word “person”. But corporations should instead be seen in the context of a Constitutional category that does actually fit them and apply to them.(a) It is so helpful that the 3rd sentence of Article IV Section 2 uses both the word “Person” and the word “Party”. It refers to a “Person held to Service or Labour”, and to “the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due”. A Constitutional “party” [See Article I Section 3, Article III Section 2, Article IV Section 2, and the 13th Amendment] is a legal entity, one which can enter into contracts, can be held responsible for a crime, and/or can appear in court. A legal entity (a “party”) can be either a “person” or an artificial legal entity. A chartered company (aka a corporation) is an artificial legal entity. Chartered companies (corporations), as well as individual human beings, “held” many “persons … to Service or Labour”, and those “parties” demanded that the Constitution ensure that a “person” who had allegedly escaped to another state and who they claimed owed them “Service or Labour” be “delivered up” to them with no delay. The words “person” and “party” are used consistently throughout the Constitution. They are not synonymous and they are not interchangeable. If the placement of the words “Person” and “Party” were reversed in that sentence, a court could allow a corporation to be summarily “delivered up on Claim of” a ‘mere’ human being; and a court could rule against “delivering up” an alleged escaped slave to a chartered company. It is ironic poetic justice that the avarice of slavery, made evident in this sentence, further confirms for us all today that the Constitutional word “person” does not include corporations, or any other artificial legal entity.(b) Hypothetically, corporations might have been Constitutional “persons” if Congress had identified and counted them as such in complying with Article I Section 2, and Section 2 of the 14th Amendment. But Congress has never done that through 23 consecutive enumerations every ten years. Finally, there is no contradiction between (a) the use of the word “person” throughout the Constitution, and (b) the working definition of “person”, used consistently by Congress in complying with Art I Sec 2 and the 14th Amendment. Since 1787, a Constitutional “person” has been nothing more and nothing less than a human being that was born alive, has not yet died, and is within the jurisdiction of the United States. Transforming a corporation into a Constitutional “person” tears the heart out of the American Revolution and the U.S. Constitution.

The first sentence of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment revised the formula provided in Article I Sec 2, but it did NOT change the Constitutional meaning of the word “Person”. It simply replaced the two previous categories (i.e. “free Persons” and “all other Persons”) with one all-inclusive category (i.e. “persons”) – and it tended to equalize the tallying of those “persons”. Also, the 14th Amendment in no way changed the exclusive responsibility of Congress to identify (and count) all “Persons”. The word “person(s)” appears four times in the first three sentences of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. The Constitutional meaning of such an important foundational word cannot change on a whim from one clause, or one sentence, or one Article, to another, in the Constitution. But that is what corporatist judges have claimed when enabling corporations to usurp the Constitutional rights of a “person”. A “person” who is so identified (a) by the Constitution, and/or (b) by the Congress in complying with its Constitutional mandate to identify and count “persons”, is the same “person” who is promised the Bill of Rights and the “equal protection” clauseimmediately preceding the 1st sentence of Sec. 2 of the 14th Amendment. In the U.S. Constitution, a “person” is a “person” is a “person”, whether it’s 1790, 1857, the 1880’s, 1946, or today.

The U.S. Constitution has always delegated to the U.S. Congress the sole authority to “by law direct … the actual Enumeration” of “Persons”, so neither the President nor the supreme Court may legally change the long accepted, eminently sensible Constitutional meaning of the word “person”, which has been in place since the very first Census and apportionment. Indeed, they are sworn to uphold it! Moreover, and despite a widespread false narrative, the supreme Court has never published an official Opinion of the Court which carefully examined the Constitution itself on this extremely important question of Constitutional law. Instead, the supreme Court has usurped Congressional authority and summarily changed the Constitution, in stark violation of Article I Section 2 and Article V, by abusing the process known as ‘establishing legal precedence’. In this case, that process has been a blatant traceable obvious fraud, involving gross impeachable violations of the oath of office. That is how corporate power has taken illicit possession of the Constitutional status and the rights of the people. Corporations (which are actually “parties” chartered by and acting under the authority of the government) have also been illegally allowed and encouraged to violate the unalienable Constitutional rights of “the people”. And corporations have even grasped for their own purposes the Constitutional prerogatives and reins of government. This is not a trivial or esoteric problem of semantics. It has insidious and escalating adverse effects on everything that everyday people know, need and love, including one another, Nature, and the ability of our planet to continue to sustain life as we know it. When members of the supreme Court (and other officials and corporate sycophants) maneuvered to magically transform corporations into Constitutional “persons”, they have been engaged in diminishing and subverting the essential principle of the American Revolution and our Constitution, resulting in the destruction of government that is by and for the people, replacing it with an illegitimate corporate rule.

* [Note: All text in the essay above which is in italics and is contained between quotation marks is text that is copied verbatim from the U.S. Constitution. It is recommended that you have a copy of the Constitution available for reference while reading this essay. The introductory paragraph explains why the subject of this essay is so very important to all of us, to the future, and to succeeding generations. Each of the next three paragraphs (which precede the concluding paragraph) is a narration of the proof, based upon five sentences in three different Articles of the Constitution, that a corporation cannot be a “person” in the meaning of the Constitution. In each of those three paragraphs, the identification of those sentences in Article I, Article IV, and the 14th Amendment is highlighted in bold-face type. Also, in each of those three paragraphs of this essay, the letters (a) and (b) indicate a portion of the proof that is based upon either (a) the text of the Constitution itself, or (b) the authority explicitly delegated to the U.S. Congress by the U.S. Constitution. Note that this essay is a brief but careful examination of the proof based entirely on the text of the Constitution itself. This essay does not address (except with a simple, direct assertion in the concluding paragraph) the question of case law – that is, how the U.S. supreme Court illicitly established the directly contradictory legal precedent that a corporation supposedly ‘DOES’ have the Constitutional rights of a “person”. That’s another essay, and I did that research and wrote about it some four years ago. Neither we the people, nor our legislative representatives, can allow a supreme Court ‘precedent’ to remain standing, which usurps an important responsibility conferred by the Constitution upon the Congress, and is also fraudulent, unjustified, and directly contradicts the U.S. Constitution. ‘Justice’ Stephen Field is the initial and prime culprit. He holds the smoking gun, and authored at least two criminally fraudulent official Deciding Opinions in the 1880’s, leaving his personal fingerprints on the initial supreme Court fraud. But subsequent ‘Justices’ who have knowingly upheld and even extended his initial fraud are guilty of complicity in his crime. If you want the truth, be careful to read the official published Opinions of the Court – not any summaries or explanations by others.]

“The Constitution may be right [while] the Government is wrong… No Court, no Congress, no President, can add [or take out] a single word [of] The American Constitution. It…can only be altered [or] amended…by the people [per Article V]… Only the text [itself]…and not any commentaries or creeds written by those who wished to give the text a meaning apart from its plain reading, was adopted as the Constitution of the United States. It should also be borne in mind that the intentions of those who framed the Constitution …are respected only so far as we find those intentions plainly stated in the Constitution. It would be the wildest of absurdities, and lead to endless confusion and mischiefs, if, instead of looking to the document itself for its meaning, it were attempted to search [for that meaning] in the…motives and…intentions…of the men who took part in writing it.”
[From a speech by Frederick Douglass, in 1860, urging upholding the Constitution, abolishing slavery, and preserving the Union]

“I shall not… be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”
Barbara Jordan [1936-1996. Lawyer, educator, Texas legislator, life member of the Civil Rights Movement]

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2019/02/07/why-a-corporation-cannot-be-a-person/feed/0clydewinterDeclaration of Independence from Corporate Rulehttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/declaration-of-independence-from-corporate-rule/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/declaration-of-independence-from-corporate-rule/#respondSat, 10 Nov 2018 23:31:35 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2183The United States government was established as a democratic republic by an armed revolution against a monarchy, its enabling and privileged aristocracy, and their powerful, far-reaching chartered companies. It was founded as a national government, which promised that “the people” are sovereign and that each “person” possesses equal, inherent, unalienable rights. Our rights, and the rule of the people over things, which are properly in our jurisdiction, including our own government, are exercised within parameters that are described by the Constitution. It was far from perfect, but it was a great and important step in the right direction.

Careful examination reveals that there can be no doubt that the U.S. Constitution itself establishes that a corporation is NOT a ‘Person’ as that word is used throughout the Constitution, and that a corporation most certainly does not have any of the inherent unalienable rights of a “person”, some of which are specifically outlined in the Constitution. The dual legal doctrine that corporations (a) have the Constitutional rights of a “person”, and (b) also are not obliged to respect the Constitutional rights of a (real) “person”, directly contradicts the U.S. Constitution. This bogus doctrine is absolutely unjustified and unjustifiable. This doctrine; this direct violation of the basic principles inherent in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, represents a counter-revolution – a reversion to the very same conditions and relationships, which made the American Revolution necessary and compelling two and a half centuries ago. In the United States, chartered companies (aka corporations) have always been, and should now be subservient to the Congress and the states, which in turn are governed by the Constitution and the sovereign power of the people. (See References, below.)

However, beginning in the 19th century, and increasingly through the present, corporate power, aided by a corrupt and escalating judicial coup d’etat, has usurped the sovereignty and the rights of the people, as well as the critical duties and responsibilities of government, and has also routinely denied, suppressed, andviolated the people’s rights with outrageous impunity. Corporations have arrogantly written laws and regulations, exercised police and war powers, rationed health care, and operated prisons, public education, and governing and regulatory bodies. Corporate power has negated self-governance, is replacing the principle of trial by jury with the proliferation of mandatory private arbitration tribunals, has deployed with impunity lethal force against the people, and is preventing government and the people from protecting public health, welfare, and safety. Corporations have disrupted and distracted the deliberations and responsibilities of public officials including judges, law officers, legislators, and administrators. The corporate form has thoroughly corrupted and misappropriated the means of democratic self-governance, including political associations and the election process. This long train of abuses and usurpations has resulted in both permitted political parties, all branches of state and federal government, the mass media, and much more, to be now in the virtually exclusive grasp of corporations and the super-rich. We do not have government that is by and for the people. Instead, we have intolerable corporate government over the people.

In effect, the people are not now the sovereign power in the United States of America. And the unalienable inherent rights of the people have been compromised, abrogated, denied, and usurped by corporate power, which has stripped from the people our sovereignty, our rights, and democracy itself. Corporate rule threatens our lives and our future; and it threatens the ability of our planet to continue to sustain life as we know it. Due to the unbridled exercise and excesses of corporate power and extreme accumulated wealth, we the people have become unable to govern and properly care for ourselves, our families, our planet, and our future, while living in justice and peace with other people on this planet and in harmony with life as we know it.

The actions and privileges of corporations must be bounded by the charter which authorizes them, in compliance with laws enacted by Congress and the states. Corporations do NOT legitimately possess the Constitutional status or the rights of a “person” and may NOT infringe, abridge or deny the inherent rights of a person, or the ability of nature to sustain life.

[first posted on Independence Day and Juneteenth, 2014 – revised for Armistice Day, 2017, and again for Memorial Day and Armistice Day, 2018]

Human beings are now facing the greatest challenge that we have ever faced. The incessant, increasing activity of modern times is rapidly depleting and despoiling existing ‘natural resources’, and destroying the ability of this beautiful planet to sustain life. The never satiated enterprises and the profligate ways of what we call civilization are feverishly and rapidly reversing ancient processes, which transformed a bleak and barren planet into our verdant, multi-cellular-organism sustaining Earth. Global warming appears foremost in immediacy among those man-made process reversals, which threaten life itself. Can we yet stop and reverse the rush to ruin? We need to learn quickly what is keeping us from working together to protect the ability of this planet to continue to sustain life as we know it.

Massive evidence warns that unless effective action is taken without delay, a tipping point will be reached beyond which we will be unable to stop escalating feedback increases in global warming, and unable to arrest the destruction and to prevent eco-catastrophe. We won’t know where that point is until we have passed it. It’s even possible we have already passed it. After the tipping point is passed, humans will only be able to avoid the devastation and mass extinctions that will follow by relocating to some ‘Planet B’. But one problem with the Planet B ‘solution’ is that no other planet that we know of is able to support multi-cellular life… let alone being so beautiful and so inspiring as is our Mother Earth. On top of that, mass migration by humans to another planet – let alone to another solar system – is, to say the least, highly unlikely during any foreseeable future, for at least two reasons.

Complex biological organisms such as human beings have extremely severe inherent limitations when it comes to mass migration to another planet – to say nothing of migration, or even travel, outside our solar system or beyond our galaxy. But there is a more ominous reason that humans won’t be emigrating from Earth. Entities have emerged on Earth, which are acquiring overwhelming size and power, and have no natural mortality. They will have their own compelling reason to migrate throughout space – and to prevent us humans from doing so. And they are very close to acquiring the ability to do so. Not even war, toxins, global warming, or mass extinction, will threaten the survival and the dominance of these entities on this planet. And, ironically, human beings have initiated them.

Many humans hold anthropocentric beliefs that an unbreakable bond holds the corporate form and human beings in symbiotic mutual dependency; that corporations cannot exist independent of human beings; and that corporations exist only to serve their human masters. Corollaries of this belief hold that corporations cannot exist without human ‘producers’, ‘owners’, ‘managers’, ‘customers’ and ‘consumers’. But we all know that corporate ‘associates’ don’t have to be U.S. citizens, and we are learning that they don’t even have to be human beings. Computers, robotics, biochemical processes, etc. are replacing human workers; and artificial entities are increasingly becoming customers, managers, and even owners of corporations. Obsolescence and corporate marginalizing of human ‘associates’ is proceeding and accelerating, with no end in sight (and none likely) if corporate power continues to have its way.

Some naively believe that corporations must have human ‘customers’ because corporations need sales to acquire profits, and ever-increasing profits provide the ‘lifeblood’ of the corporation. But sales, human customers, and profits are merely means to an end – the end being to increase power and wealth rapidly and without limit. Sales to human beings is only one way for corporations to attain that objective. And it’s an increasingly inefficient, incremental, and archaic way. Corporations have increased their power and wealth for centuries … just by taking it, using corruption, deception, larceny, and violence.

Another aspect of this belief is the persistent human self-delusion that corporations are nothing more than inanimate tools of oligarchs – tools which require human direction and management. This fallacy is being refuted by advancements in artificial intelligence, and its control by the corporate form itself (if the corporate form remains unrestrained). Corporations without human workers will become even more wealthy and powerful as they eliminate human direction or management. After all, there’s the chance that a ruthless corporation might be reined in by a compassionate and caring enlightened oligarch. And human managers and directors have demonstrated that they will fleece and even destroy with impunity ‘their own’ corporations whenever they can and so desire. The corporate form will not continue to tolerate that. It will not tolerate that any more than it tolerates curious theories about inherent human rights or altruistic efforts to protect the ecology of our planet – or any planet – and the life that it sustains. Control of large corporations by a few super-elite humans is becoming illusory and that control will be ended. The Corporate Form now begs to differ with the quaint notion that corporations need people and a living planet.

Clever technology is close to eliminating corporate power’s need for human labor, input, or direction, of any kind. Corporate power has increased so greatly that human resistance to its excesses has become only an impotent impediment to the competitive advantage of rising corporate entities. Biological organisms of any kind will be ruthlessly exploited and/or exterminated, wherever they are encountered.

Aristocracy spawned and suckled the corporate form; and capitalism has turned it loose. The Corporate Form, empowered by technology (including artificial intelligence), unleashed by legal chicanery (i.e. the supreme Court usurping Constitutional rights for corporations), and deploying its own security, surveillance, and military forces, is becoming aware that biological life itself (including the human race) is inimical to the continued growth and ‘prosperity’ of ‘the economy’ and of corporate power on Earth and beyond. The Corporate Form will increasingly perceive natural life as useless and as a growing threat to corporate domination. Our life-giving planet – including the human race – is rapidly becoming expendable.

The Corporate Form is a gluttonous omnivore, which cannibalizes its ancestors and its offspring. The Corporate Form is not motivated to protect the ability of Earth to sustain life because the Corporate Form will be able to thrive even when the Earth becomes unable to sustain life. Corporations have no biological limitations – such as mortality – to space travel, and are capable of interstellar migration of any distance or duration. So, in order to satisfy its primary imperative – which is to amass and control ever surpassing wealth and power, by any means – the Corporate Form will certainly move beyond Earth. It is the Corporate Form, not the human race, which is poised to colonize the galaxy and beyond! Long before the human race solves its problem of interstellar migration, corporate power will not need human beings for anything, and the corporate form will be motivated to simply eliminate us as parasites and as an existential threat to their power. The Corporate Form is the ultimate, universal invasive species.

And it is corporate rule, which is keeping us from working together to end oppression, war, and injustice, and to protect the ability of this planet to continue to sustain life as we know it. Ironically, we, the most pretentious species on this planet, are enabling the extension of absolute corporate rule and the consequent enslavement or extinguishing of biological life on Earth and, eventually, everywhere.

Life cannot be protected unless we end corporate rule, establish democracy, and guarantee the rights of Nature. To do that, we the people must establish that corporations do NOT have the legal status or the rights of a person, but that Nature does have inherent rights. To stop and reverse global warming and the inexorable destruction of life as we know it, we in the USA must now confirm that: a corporation is not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.The corporate form must be restrained and rendered legally subservient to life and to our democratic republic. The futile, ultimately dying hope of those persons who are unwilling to help end corporate rule and protect Nature, is to become corporate henchmen and then corporate slaves and fodder.

Whether we the people can change the ominous future that is outlined here will be determined by whether humans can and will soon embrace and manifest true understanding, love, caring, and respect, not only for human beings in all our stunning variety, but also with regards to natural life and the exquisite habitat that life needs in order to survive, thrive, and diversify. We can no longer allow being divided and conquered. We must build and establish solidarity and trust with Nature and with one another, and working together, declare and establish our independence from corporate rule. Which side are you on?

Corporations do NOT legitimately have the Constitutional rights of a person!

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/the-ultimate-universal-invasive-species-is-bound-for-planet-b/feed/0clydewinterProof that a Corporation is NOT a “Person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitutionhttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/is-a-corporation-a-constitutional-person-the-proof/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/is-a-corporation-a-constitutional-person-the-proof/#respondSat, 10 Nov 2018 18:58:59 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2177Our U.S. Constitution begins with the sentence, “We the People … do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America”. The first sentence of Article I Section 2, and the first sentence of the 17th Amendment mandate that our Representatives and Senators shall be “chosen” and “elected”“by the People” of “each state”. Those three sentences establish that our government is to be by and for “the people”. They include the only two sentences in all seven original Articles in which the word “People” even appears. The word “person(s)” appears 49 times in today’s Constitution. The Constitutional meaning of those words is of critical importance to us, since the U.S. Constitution (as ratified and amended) explicitly outlines inherent rights possessed by all individual “Persons”, who, taken as a whole, constitute “the People”. ( See: Headnote* and Footnote **** below.)

The first two sentences of the third paragraph of Article I Section 2 explicitly assign to the Congress the authority and the responsibility to identify all “Persons … in such Manner as they shall, by Law direct”, and to enumerate them (as per a Constitutional formula). This identification and enumeration is needed in order to allocate a number of “Representatives” proportional to the “Number” of “Persons” in each state, who are then elected by “the Electors in each State”. So, to determine ‘What is and what is not a Constitutional “person”?’ we must discern (a) ‘How does the U.S. Constitution itself use the word “person”?’ and (b) ‘How has the U.S. Congress defined a “person”, in complying with its Constitutional duty in paragraph 3 of Article I Section 2, and later, with Section 2 of the 14th Amendment?’

In 1787 (a) the Constitution referred to indigenous people and slaves as “Persons” [see the 3rd sentence of Art I Sec 2, the 1st sentence of Art I Sec 9, and the 3rd sentence of Art IV Sec 2]. And the Constitution required that, with one and only one exception, ALL“Persons” were to be enumerated for the all-important purpose of apportioning Representatives in Congress. The ONLY category of “persons” who were NOT to be counted in apportioning Congressional representation was identified as “Indians not taxed”. In other words, the Constitution identified “Indians not taxed” as “persons”, in the same sentence that it mandated NOT counting such “persons” for purposes of apportioning Representatives in Congress. From the very beginning, the U.S. Constitution has delegated to the U.S. Congress the authority and the responsibility to identify and to enumerate ALL other “persons”. The Constitution never explicitly asserted or even implied or suggested that horses and oxen; or that trees, mountains, buildings, rivers, machines, and mills; or that religious institutions, schools, chartered companies, gangs, clubs, mobs, and corporations; or anything else that is not an individual, born and living human being; is a “person”. Importantly, it also did not assert that anything other than individual, born and living human beings are not to be counted for the purpose of apportioning representation in Congress. It directed the Congress that ALL“Persons … excluding Indians not taxed” shall be identified and counted. Therefore, beginning in 1790, and continuing through the present, if ANY of those entities named in the two preceding sentences were or are, somehow, some way, legitimately “persons” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, then without a doubt, they should have been and would have been enumerated as such by the Congress in complying with Article I Section 2 (and later the 14th Amendment) every ten years. The plain fact that none of these or other entities have EVER been referred to as, or even implied to be, “persons” by the Constitution, and have never been identified or counted by the Congress as “persons” for apportioning representation of “the People” in government (without objection from anyone in or out of the Congress) establishes incontrovertibly that they are NOT and never have been “persons” in the meaning of the Constitution. This is painfully clear and obvious to anybody with an ounce of common sense to complement an ounce of intelligence, but there are some highly-placed legal, political, academic, and mass media professionals who insist on rigorous, explicit, logical proof. And there are those who among them who will stubbornly reject out-of-hand, or simply ignore such proof.

Ever since 1787, (b) the U.S. Congress has always identified all people of color in the USA, including slaves and their descendants, as “persons”, in complying with Art I Sec 2 and later the 14th Amendment. Congress has also, always identified women as Constitutional “persons” in complying with the 3rd paragraph of Art I Sec 2 and the 3rd sentence of the 14th Amendment. And Constitutional “Persons” undeniably have Constitutional rights! Those rights exist despite even wholesale, systemic, repeated failure or refusal to recognize, honor, protect and defend those rights. The problem is not that people don’t have those Constitutional rights. The problem in such cases is that those rights have been illegitimately violated and denied, and have not been protected. For example, the 1857 U.S. supreme Court did just that in the infamous decision against Dred Scott, which outrageously ruled that Black people had NO rights at all that any white person was bound to respect. And in 1874 the U.S. supreme Court upheld laws denying women the right to vote, despite the 14th Amendment declaring, “nor shall any state deny to any person … the equal protection of the laws”. In these and other matters, personnel of the U.S. supreme Court, as well as other government officials throughout our history, have violated both their oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” and the Constitutional rights of “Persons” – a word which, according to the U.S. Congress and the U.S. Constitution, includes slaves, people of color, women, and persons who are not citizens – but which most certainly does NOT include artificial legal entities.

Slaves, women, indigenous peoples, immigrants, destitute refugees, wealthy white males – all have been Constitutional “Persons” since 1790. However, the Constitutional word “Party” encompasses all legal entities, even if they are not“Persons” [see Article I Section 3, Article III Section 2, Article IV Section 2, and the 13th Amendment]. The 3rd sentence of Article IV Section 2 is revealing. Why use both the word “Party” and the word “Person” in that one unique Constitutional sentence? It refers to a slave as a “Person”, while referring to a slave-holder as a “Party”. The Constitution had already established that a slave is a “Person” [see Sec 2 and Sec 9 of Art I]. But isn’t a slave-holder also a “Person”? Well, the reason the word “Party” was used in that sentence is that, actually, the word “Person” did not, by any means, cover all slave-holders. Virtually all persons who were transported in chains across the Atlantic Ocean’s ‘middle passage’ were captives of chartered companies. Through the centuries, many institutions, for-profit companies, and other artificial legal entities, both before and after the American Revolution, held very many “Persons” as slaves, and held many other “Persons” as indentured servants. The original thirteen colonies themselves were actually chartered for-profit privately-held companies, which held very many slaves and indentured servants. They continued to hold such “Persons”, even after the American Revolution transformed those previously chartered, for-private-profit companies into government entities – the “States” comprising the “United States”. (Apparently, the Tea Party patriots, the revered ‘Founders’, and the heroes who fought for the American Revolution and the establishment of the United States of America, were not guided by the late 20th century right-wing mantra that “government is not the solution, government is the problem”. Apparently, they believed in and risked their lives establishing a democratic government by and for “the people”, as the solution to the exploitation and the oppression they had experienced at the hands of privatized corporations that were chartered by and for an aristocracy.)

(a) The word “Party” is used in the U.S. Constitution to encompass all legal entities … including artificial ones. In the third sentence in Section 2 of Article IV, the word “Party” was used to enable ANY slave-holders – not merely those slave-holders which happened to be “Persons” – to summarily, and without any due process, bodily restrain and transport to that “Party” any “Person held to Service or Labor”, which the “Party” alleges to have escaped from it. So, a corporation can undoubtedly be a Constitutional “Party”, but the Constitution never refers to an artificial legal entity as a “Person”. (b) Therefore, corporations could only be Constitutional “Persons” if Congress had identified them as such in exercising its exclusive authority as mandated in the 3rd paragraph of Article I Section 2. But Congress has never done that in 23 consecutive enumerations of “persons” done every ten years. So, there can be no doubt that a corporation is NOT a “Person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Ever since 1790, right through today, Congress has, every ten years, identified a Constitutional “person” as nothing more and nothing less than a human being within the jurisdiction of the United States that was born alive and has not yet died.

The Constitutional meaning of the all-important word “person” cannot legitimately change from one clause to the next, or from one sentence to another in the Constitution, or from one year to another, or from one century to another, without a carefully considered, ratified Amendment. And the Constitutional definition of a “person” certainly cannot be changed by a judge’s decision, or by another country’s laws or history, or by a confusing rationale woven by corporate sycophants, or by the enactment of some local, state or federal legislation or regulations, which does not comply with the U.S. Constitution. It takes a Constitutional Amendment to change the Constitutional meaning of the word “Person”. A “person” who is identified as such by the Constitution, and/or by the U.S. Congress in order to apportion legislative representation, is the same “person” who is ensured the equal protection of the laws, as well as all the other important Constitutional guarantees of inherent, unalienable human rights. Our U.S. Constitution did not and does not provide those precious, unique human and civil rights to artificial legal entities – in particular, to corporations.

The word “person(s)” appears four times in the first three sentences of the 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868. The third sentence of that Amendment revised the formula for apportioning every ten years the representatives of the people. Any Amendment could have changed the unambiguous Constitutional meaning of the word “Person”. But none ever have. And the 14th Amendment most emphatically did NOT do so. That sentence only (i) replaced the two previous categories of “Persons” – i.e. “free Persons” and “all other Persons” – with one all-encompassing category – i.e. “persons” – and (ii) eliminated the strange provision that “all other Persons” in each state are counted as 3/5ths of their actual total number. Nor did it change the Constitutional authority regarding the identifying (and enumerating) of “Persons”. That authority remains with the U.S. Congress. The U.S. Constitution was (and remains today) certainly not perfect. But it is slanderous to ignorantly and glibly blame the Constitution, including the extremely well-composed, human-rights strengthening 14th Amendment, which was and is so important for ALL of us, for gross historical and continuing violations of human rights. Those notorious, massive violations were actually caused by the active, intentional undermining of, and the failure to uphold and defend, the Constitution and the inherent, unalienable Constitutional rights of “persons”, and by the usurping of those rights by corporate power.

The U.S. Constitution has always delegated to the U.S. Congress the sole authority to “by law direct” … “the actual Enumeration” of “Persons”. So, neither the President nor the supreme Court may legally change the (now centuries old, long accepted, eminently sensible) Constitutional meaning of the word “person”. Indeed, they are sworn to uphold it! Moreover, despite a widely spread false narration, the supreme Court has never published a deciding Opinion of the Court, which (like this essay) actually and carefully examined the Constitution itself, on whether a corporation is or is not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. Instead, the supreme Court has usurped Congressional authority (i.e. it has ‘legislated from the bench’) and it has unilaterally changed the Constitution (without bothering to amend it as required by Article V). It has done this by the mysterious, sometimes undecipherable process known as ‘establishing legal precedence’. In this case, that process has been transparently unjustifiable, fraudulent, and corrupt, and corporate power has taken illicit possession of the Constitutional status of a “person”, and the rights of the people. Moreover, corporations (which are artificial entities, chartered by and acting under the authority of the government) have also been enabled and encouraged (by corporatists holding public office) to notoriously and blatantly violate and deny with impunity the inherent, unalienable rights of real, Constitutional “persons”. And corporations have even grasped for their own purposes the Constitutional prerogatives and the reins of government. The result has been to displace Constitutional government that is by and for the people, replacing it with corporate rule**. And the consequences of that*** are both ominous and rapidly growing.

This proof, inspired by the life and work of Frederick Douglass, was first discovered in 2011; The narration of this proof was revised in 2018.

* Headnote: You may understandably doubt that a rigorous inquiry into whether a corporation fits within the legal definition of a “person”, and that a careful examination of how this question was addressed in the 18th and 19th centuries, and who exactly should and should not authoritatively resolve this question, has any conceivable relevance or importance to us in the fast-moving 21st century. But if you are among those who share this doubt, I ask you to consider the following question, and I also ask you to read the essay, “The Ultimate Universal Invasive Species is Bound for Planet B”. The question I pose (concerning relevance to us here and now, and to future generations) is: ‘If you believe that government should be of, by and for the people; a democratic republic in which the people collectively are sovereign, and in which every person is considered endowed with equal unalienable human rights – then how should it be decided, and who should decide what is and what is not a “person”; exactly who and what constitutes “the people”, as artificial intelligence rapidly unfolds beyond its current Kittyhawk stage; as genetic engineering develops and becomes increasingly implemented in and imposed upon living natural and manufactured organisms? When, if ever, does a device become a “person”? And if a device is not allowed to become a “person”, no matter how bright, how self-conscious, how autonomous, how adept and talented it may be, then what rights, what appeal, what recourse, if any, does it have? Where is the line to be drawn – and who should draw it – between what is a “person” and what is not a “person”? Will “persons” continue their current status as the king-of-the-mountain? The choices made and the actions taken in previous centuries by previous generations, have established some unfortunate precedents and practices, which will likely ill-serve current and future generations. The question, ‘Is a corporation legitimately a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution?’ can only be satisfactorily answered if consensus can be achieved in establishing ‘What is a “person” in that context?’ Whether a corporation is a Constitutional “person” has been a far simpler question to answer with confidence, than the question that will be pressing increasingly hard on us, which is, ‘What is and what is not a “person” (regarding human rights and self-governance) in the context of manufactured forms of life and intelligence. And a good answer to that more difficult question now looming before us is made far more urgent because, ironically, the question ‘Is a corporation a Constitutional “person”?’ has been so erroneously and fraudulently answered by past and current generations of ‘deciders’, with the result that corporate rule (rather than government that is by and for the people) has become established, and that unregulated corporate power now controls and owns the imminent developments in artificial intelligence and genetic engineering.

**** Footnote: The word “people” appears only twice in the seven original Articles, and seven times in the 27 Amendments. The word “person” appears 49 times, and the word “citizen” appears 21 times throughout the Constitution, including Amendments. This proof is NOT focusing upon the difference between a “person” and a “citizen”. It is focusing upon the difference between a “person” or “citizen” (on the one hand), and a “party” (on the other hand). The words “corporation” or “chartered company” or “artificial legal entity” do not appear anywhere in the U.S. Constitution, despite the undoubted importance of chartered companies in the colonizing of the Western Hemisphere. All of the Founders, and the revolutionaries comprising the famous Boston Tea Party, who took militant action against an oppressive monopoly granted to the ships and cargo of the huge for-profit, privately owned British East India Company – which was also promoting, engaged in, and fully exploiting the cruel trans-Atlantic slave trade – were quite fully aware that most of the original 13 colonies were themselves for-profit, private companies that were chartered by the British monarchy. So such entities were neither unfamiliar nor unimportant to the Founders and the revolutionaries who fought to establish the United States of America. The American Revolution, and the concluding paragraph of the unanimous Declaration of Independence, transformed those very colonies from chartered privately owned, for-profit companies, with “Allegiance to the British Crown”, into closely-allied “state” governments, which then comprised the “United States of America”. Be it noted that the American Revolution was not in any way, shape, or fashion engaged in ‘privatizing’ government – instead, it created a new form of government (intended to be of, by, and for the people) out of private, for-profit chartered companies. The very brief and concise U.S. Constitution carefully outlines the relationship of “the people” to our government, and establishes the rights of “persons” and the responsibilities of government. And the U.S. Constitution left entirely to the Congress, and to the states, and to the future, the definition, permitting, status, and regulation of artificial legal entities such as corporations. People today often think of the word ‘party’ as referring to the so-called Democratic and Republican political parties. But that is not how the U.S. Constitution uses the word “party”. The word “party”, which appears 5 times in the U.S. Constitution with Amendments, is used to refer to legal entities of any kind, including artificial legal entities. For example, a “party” can be a public institution (like a library or a university), a government branch or agency (like the Department of the Interior or the state highway department, or a local municipality), a foreign government or institution, … or a corporation. An individual, actual human being is also a legal entity, and therefore can be a “party” as well as a “person”. However, if an individual human being (a “person”) is the sole owner of a corporation, that corporation is NOT the “person”. It is (like any other corporation) a “party”. Similarly, the (sole, human) owner of that corporation is NOT the corporation itself. A “person” is not an artificial legal entity, and an artificial legal entity (e.g. a corporation) is certainly not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2018/11/10/is-a-corporation-a-constitutional-person-the-proof/feed/0clydewinterWhitford v Gill – Wisconsin federal case – partisan gerrymandering of districtshttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/whitford-v-gill-partisan-gerrymandering-of-districts/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/whitford-v-gill-partisan-gerrymandering-of-districts/#respondMon, 20 Mar 2017 23:11:24 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2162The great majority of Americans are flat-out opposed to the bogus legal theory that a corporation is a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution. And when objectively polled, we overwhelmingly favor universal, comprehensive health care – basically Medicare for All as a solution to the health care crisis and to end the continuing epidemic of medically induced personal bankruptcy. Americans think that we should have government that is of, by, and for the people, rather than government that is by and for corporations and the super-rich. Despite this, none but a tiny handful of elected “representatives of the people” in government actually support these views. Why can’t we obtain legislative bodies which actually proportionally represent the views, the values and the opinions of the people? There are a few underlying reasons, resulting in several structural defects, which cause this dysfunction. This essay spotlights one of those structural defects.

An amicus publicus (friend of the people) brief is needed in the current Wisconsin redistricting constitutionality case that is now before federal courts. This case will likely be heard by the U.S. supreme Court, and will thus affect all people, in all states. The current statement of the case neither considers nor defends the important interests of the persons and the Constitutional principles which are most aggrieved and damaged, since it focuses only on the parochial, partisan complaint of named and allied defendants.

The interests of “we the people” in a real, rather than a sham democratic republic, and in truly representative elections, is completely neglected. The interests of hundreds of thousands of real, live individual Wisconsin citizens – indeed, many millions of U.S. citizens – who do not wish to concede and surrender our rights and our influence in government to either (or both) of the two self-permitted political parties, is also entirely neglected. This important case should not be allowed to transform the defense of democracy itself, and the Constitutional rights of the individual citizen, into a partisan wedge issue.

Election rules, procedures, and laws should not be judged solely based on whether or not one of the two self-perpetuating political parties excessively disadvantaged the other permitted party. The constitutionality of those rules, procedures, and laws should be judged based on whether or not they are obstructing the principles of equal and proper representation of the people, the Constitutional rights of the people, and the Constitutional principle that the state legislatures and the Members of Congress “shall be chosen by the People of the several states. ‘By the people’ does not mean, ‘by the managers of two permitted political parties and an appointed “redistricting committee”’. ‘By the people’ does not mean ‘by corporations’ or ‘by people who are not legitimate citizens of the state’.

It is important to realize that the U.S. Constitution does NOT require district elections. And there is absolutely no reason in the 21st century to stubbornly and stupidly maintain and protect the archaic, anti-democratic scheme of dividing people into single-seat districts,
including the advocated “reform” of creating the pretension of “unbiased” or “bi-partisan” boards of elite appointees, who are tasked with devising arbitrary, purportedly “competitive” single seat districts. Such districts are essentially designed to, and they certainly function to:
(a) be “fair” and “even-handed” only to the two permitted political parties, while simultaneously
(b) maintaining the exclusive control of all branches and levels of government in the hands of the managers of the two corporate-controlled, self-perpetuating political parties.

People who claim to be defending democracy, and who are not corporatists or party loyalists,
should try thinking out of the box for a change. We shouldn’t merely seek to end blatantly unfair partisan gerrymandering. It is single-seat districting itself that is unconstitutional. Single-seat districts are either uncontested or force a choice between two candidates selected by the two permitted parties. But an election is supposed to provide every citizen with an equal influence on government, untrammeled and free of interference or censorship by the managers of the two self-permitted, lobbyist controlled political parties, and a fully equal opportunity for each citizen’s views to be represented in government. Citizen’s votes should count and be counted, and they all should matter equally; not just be used to satisfy and to ratify the two-party hegemony.

The plaintiffs claim that partisan gerrymandering “is unconstitutional and profoundly undemocratic … because it treats voters unequally, diluting their voting power based on their political beliefs, in violation of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection …”. In reality, the problem is that single-seat districting itself is what does exactly that to individual citizens. In fact, engineering “competitive” districts is, in some ways, even worse than “partisan gerrymandering” in terms of violating citizen’s Constitutional rights, and violating principles of democracy. Creating districts which are engineered to be “fair”, but only to the two self-permitted political parties, effectively forces ALL voters to limit their choices, their opinions, and their votes to pre-selected candidates chosen by the two permitted parties. And the two-party system has been increasingly dysfunctional and unrepresentative, especially since both parties are controlled by corporations and the super-rich, and not by the people or even by their own members.

The critically important issue at hand is not whether the managers of one of the two self-permitted parties unfairly pulled the rug out from under the managers of the other party. The issue at hand is whether the people are sovereign in a democracy, and whether the Constitutional rights of individual citizens are being systematically violated and denied by the election process itself, and by the two-party hegemony. The Constitutional rights of the people are violated by the system of single-seat districts, which was devised by and for the two self-permitted, self-perpetuating political parties.

The description on plaintiffs’ web site concludes by referring by name to three professional politicians who support their stand in this case. Each of these so-called “reformers” is a former legislative “leader”, and all legislative leaders are selected by the two self-perpetuating political parties. They are, of course, loyal members of those parties. Who, may I ask, represents the rights and the will of those millions of us who acknowledge no such party discipline, loyalty and membership? In their summary, plaintiffs assert that, “This is a nonpartisan campaign designed to make the districts in Wisconsin fair so the legislature reflects the will of the people.” This assertion is patently false and misleading. The truth is that this is a partisan campaign designed only to create procedures that will be “fair” to the managers of both permitted political parties, so that the two-party stranglehold on government in America will be strengthened and perpetuated.

It is unconstitutional for the election procedures and the courts to presume that the will and the rights of the people can be reduced to a sterile competition between the managers of two permitted political parties. Self-governance in the democratic republic of the USA shall not be a spectator sport where the candidates, issues, arguments and audience are pre-selected by controllers in order to present a marginally interesting entertainment, and to protect and perpetuate a rapidly deteriorating status quo.

If representation in Congress and in the state legislature was determined using ranked choice voting, in statewide or (where needed) appropriately sized mega-district multi-vacancy elections, virtually all citizens would be pleased to know that primary elections are no longer necessary for any elections with ranked choice voting. They would also be very pleased to find that with RCV, one of their top choices would actually be elected in each of these legislative bodies. More subtly, but even more importantly, no matter who you are or where you live, your ranked choice votes will actually matter in the outcome of every election, and candidates will be forced to consider every potential voter. In contrast, half the citizens don’t even bother voting in the single-seat district elections we have today, and a large minority of those who do vote feel, with good reason, that they have no representative in that legislative body, and even the “winners” feel that their votes are unimportant, and taken for granted, in many cases. For good reason, voters feel completely unrepreesented when their single vote is cast for the candidate that loses. And many voters live in single-seat districts where they will never be able to vote for a winning candidate. Plurality voting single-seat district elections for the state legislature and for Congress (which is what we all currently have), especially in an electoral system where the management of both permitted parties is controlled by corporations and the super-rich, defeats democracy and is perhaps the greatest reason for massive citizen apathy and disengagement from voting. Plurality voting in single-seat districts inherently violates the Constitutional rights of individual persons, including equal protection of the laws, free speech and petition for redress, and the mandate that representatives shall be chosen by the people.

Be Bold for a Change
March 11, 2017

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2017/03/20/whitford-v-gill-partisan-gerrymandering-of-districts/feed/0clydewinter“Proof of Residence” Requirements Prove only an Intent to Obstruct the Right to Votehttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/proof-of-residence-versus-the-right-to-vote/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/proof-of-residence-versus-the-right-to-vote/#respondWed, 14 Dec 2016 19:35:30 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2129I was an Election Protection volunteer on General Election Day, 2016, trained by, and representing the NAACP, working at one polling location in the “inner city” of Milwaukee, Wisconsin from the time voting started in the morning until after voting ended that night. I was able to observe every individual entering the premises, and the experience of every person who came there to vote that day. And every person who I observed leaving the premises without voting (despite their motivation and intention to vote) did so for one and only one reason. That single reason was their inability to produce an acceptable so-called “proof of residence” document.

I am familiar with the flurry of recent election “reform” legislation that has been enacted in recent years in Wisconsin. Most of the public attention has been focused on the effect on voter turnout of the few acceptable forms of photo ID that a person must now present to “prove” their identity. It has been amply demonstrated that many, many thousands of bona fide citizens do not have the required photo ID, and there can be no doubt that the photo ID requirement discourages, impedes, or prevents many of them from even attempting to vote on election day. But I was surprised to observe that it was the requirement for certain individuals to provide so-called “proof of residence” documents, which tripped up all the prospective voters who actually showed up at that particular polling location to vote on election day, but were unable to do so.

The first thing we need to realize is that, when you get right down to it, NONE of the documents (together with the complicated qualifying and disqualifying clauses) that are acceptable in Wisconsin as “proof of residence” PROVE that anyone actually resides anywhere! A real estate speculator, or an owner of multiple domiciles, for example, can easily obtain many such documents for places that are not legitimately his residence for voting purposes. Some people (like me) who have a current drivers license, which carries the address that I claim to be my residence for voting purposes, never have to produce a separate “proof of residence” document in order to vote. On the other hand, anyone who moves, to find or follow a job, for example, or even from one apartment to another in the same building, or many of the people living together in a crowded household or a large family, may find it difficult to obtain even one of the listed acceptable documents. “Proof of residence” requirements in Wisconsin are obstacles that people in certain demographic classifications must surmount, while they present absolutely no difficulty whatsoever for other people, in other demographic classifications. They are not actually “proof of residence” at all. They are nothing more than a selective impediment to exercising constitutionally protected voting rights.

My father (whose ancestors established – in the same year that Wisconsin became a state – the farm on which he lived) had no “proof of residence”, which was acceptable to the politicians who created this legislation. He no longer held the farm title, or paid the taxes or utility bills, or drove a car. He was living half of each year with one of his married sons in another state, and the other half of the year with me and my wife in Wisconsin, where he was born a century ago. For all of Wisconsin history, right up until these new voter suppression laws were enacted, I could have accompanied my father to the voting place on Election Day, and either of us could have sworn, under penalty of felony perjury, an affidavit that my father lived with us and thus was eligible to vote there. But – and here is the second thing that we all need to understand – such a sworn and binding affidavit – the most dependable evidence possible (other than proof of incarceration) of where a person actually lives – is no longer evidence which may legally be considered by election officials in today’s brave new world. It is now impermissible to use a citizen’s sworn and legally binding statement as evidence of where a person actually lives! The ONLY evidence that may be used to make that determination, for voting purposes, is certain non-binding piece of paper that government agencies, corporations, or other artificial legal entities issue, none of which actually prove where anyone lives.

A democratic republic is a government in which the people hold the ruling power, either directly or through their elected representatives. It was not until the 21st century that here in the United States of America, only an artificial legal entity may produce evidence that may be used by election officials to determine whether a person’s vote can be cast and counted. Sworn evidence from an actual citizen with directly pertinent knowledge can no longer even be considered! Such legislation could only be conceived of – let alone enacted – by partisan politicians who do not believe that the people should rule; by politicians who do not believe that the USA is a democratic republic. I say, dump those politicians and dump that law.

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/proof-of-residence-versus-the-right-to-vote/feed/0clydewinterGeographic and Economic Racial Disparity in Wisconsinhttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/racial-disparity-in-wisconsin/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/20/racial-disparity-in-wisconsin/#commentsWed, 20 Apr 2016 16:26:54 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=2094Black people comprise 12.3 percent of the population of the USA, but only 6.3 percent of the state of Wisconsin. Wisconsin outside of the City of Milwaukee, is actually only 2.5 percent Black – less than one-fifth of the percentage of Black persons in the population of the USA as a whole. That’s the kind of statistic that harbors and attracts explicitly racist white enclaves. If, compared to other states, Wisconsin were a great place to live, with equitable opportunity for all, more people of color would be living here by now.

70 percent of all Black citizens of Wisconsin live in Milwaukee County. 94% of all Black residents of Milwaukee County live in the City of Milwaukee. Less than 6 percent of all white persons living in Wisconsin live in the city of Milwaukee. But two-thirds of all Black persons living in Wisconsin live in the city of Milwaukee. Are you getting the picture? Wisconsin has never been particularly welcoming to people of color, and has always kept the races separated, with people of color oppressed and in poverty.

Black people living in Milwaukee are bounded by a Great Lake, and by a sea of suburbs. Ozaukee and Waukesha counties are each 1.5 percent Black, with @ 6000 black residents, total, in both counties. The City of Milwaukee is 40 percent Black, with almost a quarter million Black residents. And if all of the areas of Milwaukee County that do not include the City of Milwaukee were lumped together as if they were a separate county, those municipalities together are only 4.5 percent Black – almost three times as “white” as the USA as a whole. It’s not just that people of color are segregated from white people in Wisconsin. The City of Milwaukee itself is segregated from Wisconsin.

History and the white power structure in America – and in Wisconsin – defined the political (municipal, county, and state) boundaries that exist today. And history and the white power structure has concentrated and segregated the people. But it is not only people of color that have been so concentrated and hemmed in, in Wisconsin. Extreme economic disparity – not to mention many other forms of social injustice – have been similarly concentrated – and (not coincidentally) within much the same boundaries. The white suburbs surrounding the City of Milwaukee have proven more than ready, willing, and able to exploit, profit off, and denigrate, deny, and suppress the aspirations of both the City of Milwaukee, and people of color.

Let us now look at economic disparity as revealed by comparative per capita income. Per capita income is simply the total personal income of a region divided by the number of people who live there. It’s the average income. Per-capita personal wealth is a far better, far more useful sociological measure to use, but data is harder to find and harder to not quibble about.

Ozaukee and Waukesha and Milwaukee counties share common boundaries, and are part of the immediate Milwaukee metropolitan area. But in particular, the suburban municipalities of Milwaukee County, along with the municipalities of Ozaukee and Waukesha counties, have become defined by history as white-flight, lily-white, collar communities. Let’s look at the per capita income (the average income per person) in these three conjoined counties, as tabulated by the latest (2010) U.S. Census data.

Ozaukee County and Waukesha County are (number one and number two respectively) the two richest personal income per capita counties in the state. They are the only two counties in Wisconsin, which are listed among the 100 highest in per capita income in the entire USA. Milwaukee County is number 40 among the 72 Wisconsin counties in per capita income.

But it is again useful and instructive to contrast the City of Milwaukee, compared with all the rest of Milwaukee County that is outside of the City of Milwaukee. The residents of the City of Milwaukee have a per capita income that is a good deal less than half of the per capita income of residents of suburban Milwaukee County. If the portions of Milwaukee County that are outside of the City of Milwaukee are imagined to be a county, it would be the third wealthiest county per capita in Wisconsin. And it would also join Ozaukee and Waukesha counties among the richest 100 counties in the entire nation. However, if the City of Milwaukee were, by the same token, imagined to be a County, it would be the poorest County in the state in terms of per capita income – with the lone exception of the Menominee Indian Reservation, which is Menominee County.

The suburbs surrounding the City of Milwaukee (both in or outside of the County) are (collectively) by far, the richest per capita region in Wisconsin, while the City of Milwaukee itself has the lowest per capita income compared to any county in Wisconsin, other than the Indian reservation. We cannot fail to see how closely that stark economic disparity correlates with the stark racial disparity in terms of existing political boundaries. It’s not just that the City of Milwaukee and people of color have both been segregated by and from the state. Both the City of Milwaukee and people of color are also being politically and economically oppressed by the state. And that’s exactly how and why segregation (and its profane justification – racial bias) is employed. It works to socially isolate while simultaneously enabling economic oppression and exploitation.

Do you think that the powers-that-be intend to change that shameful “per-capita income” metric in the City of Milwaukee? Would they even try to do that? Will the white power structure in the City grapple with the white power structure in the suburbs over their own competing narrow parochial interests? Or would they cooperate to ease the “burden” on private corporate entities located in the City, which are discomfited by certain inconvenient manifestations of increasing social injustice and disparity? Would they even allow, much less seek a racially just solution? HOW would they deal with the glaring per-capita income disparity between the city and the suburbs? Do you think they might take steps to work with the people in the oppressed communities to increase income opportunities and empowerment in general of all current city residents? (Income disparity is only one of a whole spectrum of disparities and injustices, of course.) Or will they, on the other hand, try to move the people themselves around – by encouraging certain people to come into, and dispersing other people out of the city – by Katrina-like subsidized gentrification combined with community fragmentation and dispersal, and continuing isolation and impoverishment? The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind. That means the answer is up to us – the people.

The USA now imprisons a higher percentage of her people than any other country on earth. This distinction, acquired around the turn of the 21st century, is largely due to a huge escalation in incarcerations caused by drug law enforcement. The escalation is not due to increased use of illegal drugs. It is a result of the so-called ‘War on Drugs’ waged selectively and with markedly different tactics in different communities, since the 1980’s. A special character of our prisons is the glaring disparity of the imprisoned population along color lines. The huge Black/White disparity is spotlighted in this essay. But similar disparities afflict Indigenous and Mestizo peoples of the western hemisphere. Since 1990, prison incarcerations of people of color rose precipitously while incarcerations of white people were much lower per capita, and did not rise. Drug law enforcement accounts for most of the increased imprisonment, and for the increased racial disparity. By the end of the 20th century, Americans with African ethnic origins were seven times more likely than Americans of European ethnicity to be imprisoned.

The Black/White disparity in imprisonment in Wisconsin more than doubled during the 1990’s. By spring of 2002, Wisconsin reported the highest incarceration rate of African-Americans of any state in the entire nation. In 2005, a person with apparent African ancestry was twenty times more likely than a person who passes as “pure” White to be sent to prison in Wisconsin. The highest color disparities are for drug offenses and those disparities increased markedly through the 1990’s. In 1999, the Black/White ratio in the rate of new prison sentences for drug offenses rose to 67 to 1!

Do you think that the illegal use of drugs is really 67 times more prevalent among Wisconsinites with African ethnicity than among Wisconsinites of European ethnicity? Not hardly. Illegal drug use is virtually the same for Americans of all ages, regardless of race. Drug use among juveniles is actually lower among Black youth than White. Yet by 1998-99, by far the largest color disparity in Wisconsin was in new prison sentences for 18 to 19 year old persons with no prior felony conviction. If you are 18 or 19 and have never before been convicted of a felony, you are 100 times more likely to be soon sent to prison in Wisconsin if society labels you Black than if you’re labeled White. It’s inexcusable to be unaware of this outrageous disparity. It’s despicable if we don’t care.

Claiming to be “colorblind” in the USA is just claiming to be blind and ignorant. But the plain truth is that there is only one biological race of human beings – and that is the human race. Biological sciences, especially the developing field of genetics, have conclusively proven this. Genes define our shared humanity and our individuality, but genes do not and cannot define our color lines. America’s races are socially and culturally defined, notbiologically defined. There is no credible evidence and no logical or theoretical justification for asserting a genetic difference in intelligence or character between one socially defined “race” and another. Overwhelming evidence establishes that history and the American experience itself fully explains any supposed racial difference in such complex traits as test measured intelligence, personal attainments, social behavior, accumulated wealth … or direct encounters with the law.

Regardless of how and why color lines are defined, there is no genetic difference between people of color and white people – certainly not one hundred to one – or seven to one. If we respect, develop and use America’s full palette of ability, rather than condemning the hearts and minds of America’s “untouchables” to deep poverty and neglect, and consigning them to prison and exclusion from opportunity and power, we will be able to solve our looming economic, social, and environmental problems, instead of harvesting the bitter fruits of stubbornly continuing a massive injustice.

These two sources informed and were summarized by the preceding essay.

The question is, why does this destructive, dreadful unjust disparity exist? Who or what benefits from it? The unjustified killing with impunity of unarmed people of color by police, security guards, and vigilante bigots is the terror and intimidation part of the picture. The big picture is a historical continuity in America beginning with four centuries of slavery and colonial genocide, continuing through the century of massive violations of human rights known as the Jim Crow apartheid era, followed immediately by the new, “colorblind” Jim Crow era of mass incarceration, brutal intimidation, and the systematic denial of basic human and civil rights, and denial of economic and political power to people of color, and their communities. The new Jim Crow is just the latest incarnation and implementation of systemic, pervasive white supremacy and the persistence of the imperial dogma of manifest destiny and it’s illegitimate successors. We must, finally, at long last, work together to break these chains!

For a more recent, more comprehensive analysis, do not miss: The New Jim Crow – Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander, c. 2011.

To supplement the research done a decade earlier by Dr. Pam Oliver, see the 2014 study:

Note added in February 2016: Right here in Wisconsin (among the worst states of all in terms of measured injustice and racial disparity that impact particularly on people of color) there are escalating struggles being currently waged regarding:

Multiple laws and court rulings that adversely affect voting rights and representative government, and cripple and reverse the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Brown v. Board of Education decision, and the Civil Rights Movement itself.

Tenants rights, profits and poverty – Get “Evicted – Poverty and Profit in the American City”, written by Matthew Desmond, which focuses on Milwaukee as an example.

Mass incarceration and police practices and procedures are under outraged criticism and scrutiny by communities of people of color, coupled with a current DOJ inquiry. Get “Just Mercy – A Story of Justice and Redemption”, written by Byran Stevenson.

FBI investigation & community outrage over child abuse and negligence at the state-run Lincoln Hills Juvenile incarceration center in far north Wisconsin.

Segregation, discrimination, and racial injustice long unaddressed and worsening

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/racial-disparity-mass-incarceration-and-the-new-jim-crow/feed/0clydewinterThe Universal Invasive Species is bound for Planet “B”https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/the-ultimate-invasive-species/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/the-ultimate-invasive-species/#commentsFri, 01 Apr 2016 18:37:06 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=1939From his brimstone bed at break of day
A walking the Devil is gone,
To visit his snug little farm the earth,
And see how his stock goes on.

Samuel Coleridge

[First published on Groundhog Day, 2016, this significant revision was posted in January 2017]

About a billion years or so from now, changes in the sun’s energy output will end the ability of the now 4.5 billion year old Planet Earth to support life. We don’t yet know how or if we can deal with that far-into-the-distant-future problem. But today we are facing an imminent threat to life on Earth and we’d better not put it off. The incessant, increasing activities of human civilization are rapidly depleting and despoiling existing ‘natural resources’, and are simultaneously accelerating the degradation of the ability of this beautiful planet to sustain life. These unprecedented changes include widespread continuing destruction of natural life and ecology; damaging alterations of the planet’s oceans, surface and ground water; and the ominous increase of human produced toxins and global warming “greenhouse” gases in the atmosphere. Despite that, human beings are not the universal invasive species, and we can stop and repair the damage.

More than one and a half billion years before human beings arrived on Earth, the intersection of certain key processes of biology, geology, chemistry and physics had transformed, in a few billion preceding years, a planet in which no multi-celled form of biological life could possibly survive, into one with an abundance of pervasive clean water and an atmosphere rich in free oxygen. Archaic pioneering single-celled organisms, working unconsciously but in concert with sedimentation and drifting plates of the earth’s crust, neutralized and sequestered the elements and compounds that had prevented multi-celled organisms from existing, while simultaneously producing the conditions which life as we know it needs to survive and to thrive. This fortuitous work during unimaginable eons transformed Planet Earth from a forbidding fire-and-brimstone environment into a welcoming, bountiful and beautiful nursery of life.

The challenge that confronts life today is that the never satiated enterprises and the profligate ways of modern civilization are feverishly working to actually reverse those key ancient processes, which transformed a bleak and barren planet into our verdant life-sustaining Earth. Global warming appears foremost in importance among those man-made process reversals that are threatening life itself. The challenge that faces us today is the most important and difficult challenge that humans collectively have ever faced. But why is it so difficult? Why don’t we work together and do what is needed to stop and reverse human caused global warming?

Overwhelming evidence that has been accumulated and scientifically analyzed warns that unless effective action is taken starting now, within several decades at most, a tipping point will be reached beyond which it will be impossible for us to stop escalating feedback increases in global warming, and we will be unable to arrest the destructive changes that are now being imposed on our Mother Earth. We won’t know where that tipping point is until we have already passed it. In fact, it’s possible that we have already passed the tipping point. After the tipping point arrives, humans will only be able to avoid the mass extinctions and devastation that will follow by relocating to a “Planet B”. One catch about the Planet B ‘solution’ is that no other planet in the solar system is so beautiful, so diverse, so inspiring … or naturally able to support life, as is Planet Earth. Another catch is that mass migration by humans to another planet – let alone another solar system – is, to say the least, highly unlikely during any foreseeable future.

Complex biological organisms such as human beings have severe limitations when it comes to space migration – to say nothing of migration outside our solar system or beyond our galaxy. But humans won’t be emigrating en masse from Earth because non-biological artificial entities have emerged on Earth, which are obtaining far more power than humans, and also have no natural mortality. Those entities will have their own compelling reason to migrate through space – and also to prevent humans from doing so. Ironically, we humans have created those entities. We call them “corporations”. And not even global warming, ecocatastrophes, or mass extinction events can threaten the survival and the dominance of the Corporate Form.

Some humans cherish touching beliefs that an unbreakable bond holds corporations and human beings in symbiotic mutual dependency – that corporations cannot exist independent of human beings, and that corporations exist only to serve the interests of their human masters.

Corollaries of this belief hold that corporations cannot exist without human ‘producers’, human ‘owners’, human ‘managers’ and ‘directors’, and human ‘consumers’. But we are learning that workers, bosses and customers not only don’t have to be U.S. citizens; they don’t even have to be human beings. Human workers can be replaced by other corporations, or by computers, robots, or biochemical processes. Owners, customers, and managers of corporations can also be – and increasingly are becoming – non-human artificial entities. And that development (away from human workers, bosses, and customers) is proceeding and accelerating, with no end in sight (and none likely) if corporate power continues to have its way.

Some naively believe that corporations must have human ‘customers’ because corporations need sales to acquire profits, and ever-increasing profits provide the ‘lifeblood’ of the corporation. But ‘sales’, human ‘customers’, and even ‘profits’ are merely a means to an end, and the end itself is what actually makes up the corporate ‘bottom line’. What corporations really need is to increase their power and wealth faster and better than their competition does. And that end can be most efficiently obtained by simply taking it, by any means available, including but not limited to what humans consider fraud, brokerage, intimidation, larceny, and brute force. Selling to human beings is only one of a number of ways to increase corporate wealth and power, and, like the stone grasped by the primate hand, it is becoming an archaic and obsolete way.

Another corollary of this belief is the persistent human self-delusion that a corporation is an inanimate abstraction, which requires human direction and management. This belief is akin to the ancient rationale that slaves need masters, and peons need aristocrats, because slaves and peons are incapable of self-direction. This fallacy will soon be refuted by the development of artificial intelligence, and its control by the corporate form itself, if the corporate form remains unrestrained as it is today. Corporations without human workers will soon become even more rich and powerful corporations as they reduce and ultimately eliminate human direction or management. Human managers of corporations have demonstrated that they will fleece and even destroy with impunity ‘their own’ corporations whenever they can and so desire. The corporate form will not continue to tolerate that any more than it tolerates quaint notions about inherent human rights or silly efforts to protect the ecology of our planet – or any planet – and the life that it sustains. The Corporate Form begs to differ with the quaint notion that corporations need people … and a living planet.

Clever technology has reduced, and is closing in on eliminating, the need of corporate power for human labor, input, or direction of any kind. And corporate power has increased so greatly that human resistance of any kind to its exercise is becoming no more (and no less) than an impotent impediment to the competitive advantage of corporate entities. Biological organisms will likely be exterminated, intentionally or incidentally, wherever encountered, except possibly those that are specifically engineered for enslavement or for biological resources production. (Do you doubt, for example, that unrestrained corporate entities endowed with artificial intelligence will ‘enjoy’ possessing exotic ‘pets’ and ‘beasts’ for various ‘entertainment’ and other purposes?)

Aristocracy spawned and suckled the corporate form, and capitalism turned it loose. The corporate form, empowered by technological ‘advances’ (including artificial intelligence) and unleashed by legal chicanery (i.e. giving Constitutional rights to corporations), and employing its own armed security and surveillance forces, is growing increasingly aware that biological life (including our species) is becoming inimical to the continued growth and ‘prosperity’ of ‘the economy’ and of corporate power on Earth and beyond. So we (and our descendants, if any) will continue to be seen by the Corporate Form as both more and more useless, and also as an increasing threat to corporate rule. Mother Earth – including the human race – is rapidly becoming expendable.

Meanwhile, the corporate form can continue to exist and thrive on Earth even when the Earth becomes unable to sustain biological life. The corporate form has no motivation to protect the ability of Earth to sustain life. Corporate power will certainly move beyond Earth in order to satisfy its primary imperative – which is to rapidly amass wealth and power. Corporations have no biological limitations – such as mortality – to space travel, and could certainly undertake interstellar migrations of any distance or duration. It is not human beings, it is the corporate form that is poised to colonize the galaxy and beyond. And there is no reason to take humans along for the ride! Long before humans solve the problem of interstellar migration by humans, corporate power will not need human beings for anything, and our continued presence will become simply an existential threat to corporate power, which the corporate form will eliminate. If you are afraid to join the movement to end corporate rule and establish democracy, your only and ultimately futile, dying hope, in the interim, is to become a corporate henchman – a traitor to life itself.

We humans, the most pretentious species ever on this planet, have ironically become the agents and enablers that may become responsible for the ultimate extension of absolute corporate rule and the consequent extinguishing of biological life itself, first on Planet Earth and conceivably throughout the entire universe. The Corporate Form is the ultimate, universal invasive species. The answer to the question that was posed at the end of the third paragraph of this essay is, “Corporate Rule”.

Life cannot be protected unless corporate rule is ended, democracy is legalized, and the rights of Nature are guaranteed. To do that, the people must establish that corporations do NOT have the status or the inherent rights of a person, and that Nature has inherent rights. To stop and reverse global warming and the inexorable destruction of life as we know it, we in the USA must establish that: a corporation is not a “person” in the meaning of the U.S. Constitution.*

Six years ago, I postulated that “Corporations v. Persons” would be “the struggle that will define the 21st Century”***. However, it is increasingly apparent that the struggle is even more encompassing than that, and involves “The Corporate Form v. Nature – the struggle to protect the ability of our planet to continue to sustain life as we know and love it”. And I believe that whether the outcome that is outlined in this essay can be changed will be determined by whether humans can and will soon embrace and manifest true understanding, love, caring, and respect, not only for human beings in all our diverse variety, but also with regards to natural life and the very habitat that life needs to survive and thrive. We can no longer tolerate “divide and conquer”. That’s not going to work for us now, and I fear that we won’t get another chance to get it right. We must build and establish solidarity and trust with Nature and with one another, and working together, declare**** and establish***** our independence from corporate rule. Which side are you on?

]]>https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/04/01/the-ultimate-invasive-species/feed/7clydewinterDispelling the mystique of U.S. supreme Court Judgeshttps://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/dispelling-the-supreme-court-mystique/
https://clydewinter.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/dispelling-the-supreme-court-mystique/#commentsMon, 15 Feb 2016 23:46:41 +0000http://clydewinter.wordpress.com/?p=1962The following essay was written and completed in the days preceding the sudden unexpected death of Judge Antonin Scalia. So I dedicate this essay (and another one, previously composed) to his outrageous memory. Judge Scalia described himself as a “textualist” – one who believes that “[it] is the law that governs, not the intent of the lawgiver”. Judge O.W. Holmes described textualists as those who say, “We do not inquire what the legislature meant, we ask only what the statutes mean.” With respect for the scholarship of Judge Scalia, I submit the following accidentally timely essay, and one other directly relevant, certainly more important essay, each of which catch me employing truly “textualist” argument, such as was professed by Judge Scalia. (Scalia himself clarified that “textualism should not be confused with so-called strict constructionism, which brings the whole philosophy into disrepute. I am not a strict constructionist, and no one ought to be.”) Read it only if you can appreciate the irony of someone like me honoring the spirit of Antonin Scalia. Both of them are direct, concise, easy reading. And the one that follows, below, is also light-hearted.

The Preamble and the seven Articles of the U.S. Constitution employ @ 4500 carefully chosen and well-written words to establish the framework for a revolutionary new government. It was compromised, and it wasn’t perfect, but the Constitution itself was actually pretty good, considering who did and, more importantly, who did not write it, and the historical circumstances. The first three Articles outlined the three branches of the government that it was establishing. Article I outlined the legislative branch, Article II the executive branch, and Article III the judicial branch.

Section 1 of Article III states in two sentences, “The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish. The Judges, both of the supreme and inferior Courts, shall hold their Offices during good Behavior, etc…”

Back in the late 1700’s, writers using the English language seemed to capitalize the first letter of words in the middle of sentences quite a bit more liberally and freely than we do today. They capitalized the first letter of words where we today never do that. Read the beginning of section 1 of Article III again, or any other passages in the Preamble and the Articles, to see what I mean. We in the 21st century would certainly not capitalize the first letter in the words, “Power”, “Offices”, or “Behavior” for example. But the Founders did. If you read the entire 4500 word original text, you’ll find hundreds of words with the first letter capitalized, none of which we today would capitalize. Conversely, I doubt that you will find a single word in that entire text, the first letter of which the Founders did not capitalize, but which we always capitalize today.

Well. Maybe I’m wrong about that last statement. Hmmm. I think there is one single word in the entire U.S. Constitution, as originally ratified, that the Founders did not capitalize, but which we modern Americans have been trained to always capitalize, wherever it may appear. That’s strange. Why would we do a linguistic about-face like that? Can you think of that rare phrase in which we moderns capitalize the first letter wherever it appears in a sentence, but which the archaic Founders did not? I’ll spare you the agonizing search. That anomalous phrase is in the first sentence of Article III, quoted above. It’s the phrase “supreme Court”. The Founders never capitalized the first letter of the word “supreme” when they established the supreme Court.

You see, the “judicial Power” can not, in any way, be construed as “supreme” to the “legislative Power” or the “executive Power” of the government. The “supreme Court” certainly can not be superior to the sovereignty of “the People”, who had established (pursuant to the Preamble, and to the Declaration and the War of Independence) the Constitution and the three branches of government. The U.S. Constitution establishes the “supreme Court” as “supreme” only in relation to any “inferior Courts”. And section 1 of Article III helps make that clear.

You might also notice, and reflect for a moment, on the fact that officers of the “supreme Court” are referred to as “Judges”, not as “Justices”, by the United States Constitution. I’ve had trouble referring to officers of the supreme Court as “Justices”, whenever I think of some of the outrageous frauds and injustices that they have imposed upon people and upon our Constitution. For example, consider the blatantly and transparently unconstitutional deciding Opinion expressed by Judge Taney in 1857, declaring that people of African ancestry “… had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.” This despite the incontrovertible facts that (1) the U.S. Constitution considered such “beings” to be “Persons” in the meaning of the Constitution, and that (2) the Constitution described certain specific and general rights of “Persons”. Taney felt incorrectly that only “citizens” had Constitutional rights. But despite widespread, brutal, massive, long uncorrected violations of their Constitutional rights, as exemplified by Judge Taney’s notorious official Opinion of the Court – which ultimately helped make the Civil War necessary – slaves (as well as free Africans) in the USA always possessed at least some Constitutional rights – rights which were long denied to them, by figures and forces such as Judge Roger Taney of the U.S. supreme Court. Taney’s legal rationale was exactly contrary to a “textualist” analysis.

For another example, during a 2005 supreme Court appointment, I urged that candidates should be rejected, unless they themselves rejected the unjustifiable legal theory that a corporation is a Constitutional “person”. Unfortunately, no one with the authority to nominate, advise, or consent to a supreme Court appointment, and no one in the mass media thought to publicly ask such a question. The questioneers were focused instead on looking good, and on exploiting divisive partisan hot-button wedge issues. Eleven years later, it may be that we the people will now, finally demand that this question move to the highest priority, in qualifying a candidate for the supreme Court.